A third week has gone by! This week has finally seen some fruit being born. I was able to place a small advertisement in Brigada-Today, a weekly newsletter that is mailed to about 10,000. Within two days I had received 15 requests! After that, I had to close the site temporarily (Until Oct. 3) to allow myself time to process them.
Many of the requests were legitimate and specific. It is clear that fulfilling them will directly benefit the one requesting. It is taking anywhere from 45 minutes to a couple of hours to do a good job on each one. Already some have expressed appreciation for this service. May God be praised!
For one request, searching for information on church history in west India, my resources were exhausted. I finally had to write back requesting some specific denominations to look for because nothing specific was showing up. On the other hand, looking for information on the plight Meskhetian Turks was very easy, because all the links were directly related to this subject.
It is becoming clear the web can be a great resource if people can be directed to what they are looking for. Searching is more than just querying Google, although that is usually my starting point. Articles in the Network for Strategic Missions knowledge base prove very useful as does findarticles.com. A third area which has great potential is CompletePlanet. This service indexes 70,000+ databases which can then be queried one by one. Finally, search.msn.com allows the user to specify the region or country where the links come from. It is useful to find information from websites that originate from countries other than the U.S. or Canada. Keeping these resources behind the scenes should allow the requestor to focus on the final product, not on the multitude of links generated by these search engines.
Finally, a friend offered to help with cgi scripting. This should enable the site to more efficiently handle the form data being posted and show the user a success or error page after posting.
Until next week,
Clarence
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Saturday, September 3, 2005
Week Two
Another week has gone by and numerous hours on the computer has yielded some more gold. I have started a background section in my personal bookmark file that includes information on organizations and people important in the mission movement. This is important because websites are connected not just by links, but by the people who create them and by the people they report on.
A few people emailed back and provided some encouragement. Two so far have expressed doubt about being able to charge for this service, though one said my rate was "on the low end of the scale." A rough estimate of mine put those paying to those who wouldn't pay at 1:200 at $30 per hour. Because of this I have decided to offer this service initially at no charge.
If in the future there is greater response than I can handle, I may look for others to help or decide to charge a nominal fee of $5.00 per search. The advantage to offering a free service is that it could benefit those who have limited access to the internet - and limited funds. These are the people who could benefit most from having internet research done for them.
I wonder a little why I am doing this. One person said that it could generate a lot of work. This is true. But in the scheme of things helping those who are doing missions can also help the mission work be more effective and efficient. I can't go at this time, and I seem to be built more for helping others than I am at being out in front, so if this is the way that God would use me, then so be it.
On the whole, the initial explosion of links I was able to find has slowed down. I have been reading some periodical articles on the stratigecnetwork.org site. This site archives several very good missiological journals which are provided in html as well as pdf format where possible. Reading these has alerted me to several new sources as well as showing who is behind some of the resources on the web.
I have also been going through my online bookmark file (spurls) and refining that. It is a handy service I recommend (spurl.net). I am still thinking of using it as a container for collecting links if I do research for someone else. It still doesn't allow for a full export of links, but it has a nightly backup to two different locations, so it should be pretty safe. The links which were accidentally deleted were fully restored.
I have deliberated providing my bookmarks to others. I hesitate because I really want my service to reduce the number of links people look at and increase the time they spend looking at quality sources. At the same time, there are many good sources of missiological information out there (such as MisLinks.org) which people can use to complement a good search engine. Another excellent source for primary documents is strategicnetwork.org. Journal articles can be browsed for a modest fee of $20 per year.
That is about all for now. I welcome your comments and feedback.
Until next week,
God bless,
Clarence
A few people emailed back and provided some encouragement. Two so far have expressed doubt about being able to charge for this service, though one said my rate was "on the low end of the scale." A rough estimate of mine put those paying to those who wouldn't pay at 1:200 at $30 per hour. Because of this I have decided to offer this service initially at no charge.
If in the future there is greater response than I can handle, I may look for others to help or decide to charge a nominal fee of $5.00 per search. The advantage to offering a free service is that it could benefit those who have limited access to the internet - and limited funds. These are the people who could benefit most from having internet research done for them.
I wonder a little why I am doing this. One person said that it could generate a lot of work. This is true. But in the scheme of things helping those who are doing missions can also help the mission work be more effective and efficient. I can't go at this time, and I seem to be built more for helping others than I am at being out in front, so if this is the way that God would use me, then so be it.
On the whole, the initial explosion of links I was able to find has slowed down. I have been reading some periodical articles on the stratigecnetwork.org site. This site archives several very good missiological journals which are provided in html as well as pdf format where possible. Reading these has alerted me to several new sources as well as showing who is behind some of the resources on the web.
I have also been going through my online bookmark file (spurls) and refining that. It is a handy service I recommend (spurl.net). I am still thinking of using it as a container for collecting links if I do research for someone else. It still doesn't allow for a full export of links, but it has a nightly backup to two different locations, so it should be pretty safe. The links which were accidentally deleted were fully restored.
I have deliberated providing my bookmarks to others. I hesitate because I really want my service to reduce the number of links people look at and increase the time they spend looking at quality sources. At the same time, there are many good sources of missiological information out there (such as MisLinks.org) which people can use to complement a good search engine. Another excellent source for primary documents is strategicnetwork.org. Journal articles can be browsed for a modest fee of $20 per year.
That is about all for now. I welcome your comments and feedback.
Until next week,
God bless,
Clarence
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